Fugitive's Return Has Cops Baffled

'87 Beating Suspect Called A `Sociopath'

It was 4:30 p.m. last Friday when Evanston Police Sgt. Chuck Wernick bumped into a distinguished man making his way upstairs at police headquarters.

"He looked like a professor at Northwestern," Wernick recalled. "Bearded, dressed fairly nicely, well-groomed. You could actually smell the fabric softener on his clothing."

But John Kenneth MacDonald was not a citizen seeking police help, as Wernick first assumed. He was a fugitive charged with attempting to kill his ex-wife in 1987.

The possessions in his pockets amounted to "a toothbrush, toothpaste and $15 cash," Wernick said. MacDonald, who is being held without bond in Cook County Jail, has remained silent regarding his whereabouts since 1987.

MacDonald, 54, would not even tell Evanston police how he got to the station.

"I'm glad he's apprehended," said Charles Schockweiler, a former Evanston police commander who tracked him for years. Schockweiler now lives in Englewood, Fla.

Though he left the Evanston force in 1992, Schockweiler remembers the MacDonald case well. MacDonald, an executive recruiter in banking, entered his ex-wife's apartment in June 1987, carrying a steamer trunk and toys for their 2-year-old daughter.

MacDonald allegedly attacked her with a stun gun, beat her with a baseball bat, and tied her up with several neckties, according to police.

Alarmed by the daughter's screams, MacDonald fled before he could stuff Lorrie MacDonald's body in the trunk, police said. Schockweiler traced leads from as far away as Florida, California and the Virgin Islands, which had two strong ties to the case.

It was a place where MacDonald, a sailing enthusiast, was suspected to have relocated. The second was that "he had a buddy in the Virgin Islands, and he was supposed to ship the trunk out there to dispose of the body," Schockweiler said.

Schockweiler and his fellow investigators eventually approached the producers of Fox Television's "America's Most Wanted" in 1989, but that did not turn up their prey.

"We did a lot of work on that case," Schockweiler said. "MacDonald was obviously a sociopath and a good con man."

Schockweiler interviewed several people MacDonald encountered while living in Florida during the early 1970s. In May 1973, MacDonald was arrested for gunning down his first wife, Sharon MacDonald, 28, and her boyfriend, David Palmieri, 23.

Police said that on the night of those murders, MacDonald showed up at the apartment his ex-wife and Palmieri shared, dressed in a checked tuxedo, an Afro wig and a Fu Manchu-style mustache. Posing as an old friend of Palmieri, MacDonald gained access to the apartment and waited in a bedroom closet for several hours.

When his ex-wife and Palmieri returned, MacDonald emerged from hiding and reportedly pumped four bullets into Sharon MacDonald's body, three into Palmieri. Both were found naked from the waist down.

"When I first met him in jail, he had no focus in his eyes," said Bruce Lyons, the Florida attorney who represented MacDonald in the 1973 case. "He was catatonic."

After his arrest, MacDonald was taken to South Florida State Hospital in Pembroke Pines, Fla., where he was examined by a "slew of experts" who found him unfit to stand trial, Lyons said. MacDonald was acquitted by reason of insanity in 1977 and ordered to spend the rest of his life in the hospital.

It was also around 1977 that MacDonald, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, apparently began to make a dramatic recovery. Doctors took him off medication and transferred him to an open ward. He was freed in 1978 on the condition that he receive outpatient therapy.

"He was bright, personable, easy to get along with," said Lyons, who has not heard from MacDonald since the 1987 beating.

"When I heard about that second incident, I was really disappointed," Lyons said. "I thought he was getting his life in order."